The sky was as full of motion and change as the desert beneath it was monotonous and still,--and there was so much sky, more than ...at sea, more than anywhere else in the world. The plain was there, under one's feet, but what one saw when one looked about was that brilliant blue world of stinging air and moving cloud. Even the mountains were mere ant-hills under it. Elsewhere the sky is the roof of the world; but here the earth was the floor of the sky. The landscape one longed for when one was away, the thing all about one, the world one actually lived in, was the sky, the sky!LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

A tree that can fill the span of a man's armsGrows from a downy tip;...A terrace nine stories highRises from hodfuls of earth;A journey of a thousand milesStarts from beneath one's feet.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Can fire be carried in the bosom without burning one's clothes? Or can one walk on hot coals without scorching the feet? So is he ...who sleeps with his neighbor's wife; no one who touches her will go unpunished.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Not to find one's way in a city may well be uninteresting and banal. It requires ignorance--nothing more. But to lose oneself in a... city--as one loses oneself in a forest--that calls for a quite different schooling. Then, signboard and street names, passers-by, roofs, kiosks, or bars must speak to the wanderer like a cracking twig under his feet in the forest.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Nelse McLeod: Faith can move mountains Milt, but it can't beat a faster draw. There's only three men I know with his kind of speed...--one's dead, the other's me, and the third is Cole Thornton.Cole Thornton: There's a fourth.McLeod: Which one are you?Thornton: I'm Thornton.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

Money indeed may be considered as the most universal and expressive of all languages. For gold and silver coins are no more money ...when not in the actual process of being voluntarily used in purchase, than words not so in use are language. Pounds, shillings, and pence are recognized covenanted tokens, the outward and visible signs of an inward and spiritual purchasing power, but till in actual use they are only potential money, as the symbols of language, whatever they may be, are only potential language till they are passing between two minds. It is the power and will to apply the symbols that alone gives life to money, and as long as they are in abeyance, the money is in abeyance also; the coins may be safe in one's pocket, but they are as dead as a log till they begin to burn in it, and so are our words till they begin to burn within us.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

There is something about poverty that smells like death. Dead dreams dropping off the heart like leaves in a dry season and rottin...g around the feet; impulses smothered too long in the fetid air of underground caves. The soul lives in a sickly air. People can be slave-ships in shoes.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

At this very moment,... the most frightful horrors are taking place in every corner of the world. People are being crushed, slashe...d, disembowelled, mangled; their dead bodies rot and their eyes decay with the rest. Screams of pain and fear go pulsing through the air at the rate of eleven hundred feet per second. After travelling for three seconds they are perfectly inaudible. These are distressing facts; but do we enjoy life any the less because of them? Most certainly we do not.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »

--I am the resurrection and the life. That touches a man's inmost heart.--It does, Mr Bloom said....Your heart perhaps but what price the fellow in the six feet by two with his toes to the daisies? No touching that. Seat of the affections. Broken heart. A pump after all, pumping thousands of gallons of blood every day. One fine day it gets bunged up: and there you are. Lots of them lying around here: lungs, hearts, livers. Old rusty pumps: damn the thing else. The resurrection and the life. Once you are dead you are dead. That last day idea. Knocking them all up out of their graves. Come forth, Lazarus! And he came fifth and lost the job. Get up! Last day! Then every fellow mousing around for his liver and his lights and the rest of his traps. Find damn all of himself that morning.LESSATTRIBUTION DETAIL »